Our technological infirmity

Running Into One Of Life’s Walls

Our backyard in early spring. I feel blessed to see it again

Goose and I have been quiet but it has been for a good reason. Last Friday after my annual physical at 10 AM, I was pretty happy. My blood sugar was at its best level since we moved here from the coast in February 2021. My blood pressure was 112/68 and I had lost a couple of pounds. I came back by the house and picked my wife, Glenda, for a trip to Winston-Salem. I neglected to have something to drink while home. Since I had been fasting that was a mistake. We decided on Culver’s for our meal because I want some good french fries since it is something we rarely have. I got my smashburger, order of extra crispy fries, and a Coke Zero which is also something I rarely have. After an enjoyable lunch we went across the street to Lidl to pick up a chicken to grill and a few other things. I had paid for the groceries, got Glenda in the car and was taking the cart back to the cart corral when I started feeling not so good. I stopped for a moment and rested by sitting on one of the concrete posts. Then I went back to the car put Glenda’s rolling walker in the back of the card and started sweating. It was a hot day, well into the eighties. I sat down in the driver seat and that is the last thing I remember until I woke up with Glenda pounding on me. I had passed out.

EMS was there shortly after I awoke. I was loaded into an ambulance and transported the short distance down Silas Creek Parkway to Novant’s Forsyth County Hospital. The only discomfort during the ride was them trying to start an IV on the bumpy road. They finally gave up.

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We spent the next six on seven hours in the Emergency Area while they ran tests. I was finally told that I didn’t have a heart attack but the enzyemes that show up prior to a heart attack were elevated. They suspect dehydration played a significant role in the event.

Wednesday afternoon, I was finally discharged after a battery of tests including a heart catherization and a transesophageal electrocardiogram (TEE). My heart rhythm came back on its own. “Heart catherization is a procedure where a thin, flexible tube (a catheter) is inserted into a blood vessel and guided to the heart to diagnose and/or treat heart conditions. The TEE is a type of echocardiogram (ultrasound of the heart) where a probe with a transducer is inserted through the mouth and down the esophagus to get clearer images of the heart structures, especially those at the back of the heart.” While both procedures sound scary, they are short and painless. They take probably 35 minutes for the two of the them if you ignore the 4:30 AM bath in some sort of special prep the night before each one. The nurse was careful to use warm water the first night. The next night it cold water which was no fun. I was also on Heparin drip with IV pole for three days. Getting on the drip is also no fun since they have test your blood ever six hours until they get it right. My hands look like purple pin cushions They eventually decided I didn’t need the Heparin.

What I do need is a new aortic heart valve since mine is calcified. They are proposing a “Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) which is a minimally invasive procedure that replaces a narrowed aortic valve with an artificial valve.” It’s an alternative to open-heart surgery. We have several doctor’s appointments in the next few weeks and the hope is that sometime late this month a TAVR procedure will happen. I will go in on a Tuesday morning (TAVR Tuesdays I am told) have the hour long procedure then spend a day being observed before being discharged.

I have been told that within a month, I will regain much of the energy and strenght that seems to have faded from my aging (76 year-old) body. In the spring of 2018, my total mileage for the previous 12 months 1,530 miles. The next three years, I averaged 1,100 miles. The last three years, I have only average 600 miles. On July 3, 2017, I walked 10.5 miles in one day. I managed only a few quarter miles of swimming last summer, compared to several the year before.

There are more than enough excuses, more deskwork and less time but also a problem with a sciatic nerve. I have a goal to lose thirty pounds this summer. I already have lost six pounds which I credit to hospital food.

All this makes you look at life a little differently. I was able to finish up an office project with my 10,000 cell spreadsheet and the nice GIS maps that I do this afternoon. By Sunday night I hope to finish my taxes or as I say tie up an important loose end.

I have walked well over five times what I did any day in the hospital. I cooked my own breakfast and cooked the salmon cakes for dinner – I did not partake of the gravy. Strangely the high blood sugar that I have been battling seems to relatively stable right now. I haven’t had Metaformin in a week so that is also a good sign. I think being in a hospital long term can really suck the life out of you. I feel blessed to be home with my wife and tabby cats.

I am very grateful for my wife who cared enough to pound on me and for a lady named Judy Hill, a stranger, who was there to give her support when no one else would. I am impressed with Novant’s heart team and have no concerns about letting them try to fix me. The good news is that my arteries had no plaque so with a new valve, I might get back to some serious walking. My son, Michael, and been a champ in stepping up to do whatever needed doing including retrieving our car after an Uber ride and bringing me clean clothes at the hospital.

My primary care physician and I had agreed on having my life long heart murmur examined this summer. I think that might be one thing that I can take off the summer’s list. A few residents at the hospital even got to hear it. I can consider myself lucky to have been where care was not far away.

I did meet a trump supporter technician in the hospital. My conclusion is that evenyone who works in the hospital works such long hours (12 hour shifts) that they have no time to dive deep into the news. It took me two days to find someone who had watched the NCAA basketball final.

My last thought is what if we took all the people doing billing and collections and retrained them to work in hospitals? What a wonderful start that would be on better healthcare with universal covervage. I was once told there are more billing people at Duke’s Medical Center than there are doctors. That seems wrong and from how stretched the nurses were during my hospital stay, I know they could use some help.

A final word, I have a high dedcutible Blue Cross Health supplement. It has worked well because I haven’t been sick. Any paid subscriptions that I get will be going right into a saving account to cover what I think will be a substantial deductible. It is no fun getting sick and living on a fixed income.

I can assure everyone that I will continue writing and perhaps providing some real insight into what it is like being a heart patient. With some luck, I can convince my younger daughter to plant three or four tomatoes for me. It would be a wonderful gift to be able to look after them this summer.

Fun fact, I have had two overnight stays in a hospital, this most recent one of five days and another one night stay for a liver biopsy. It was the same hospital fifty-six years apart. I still remember waking up from my liver biopsy and a cute candy-striper told me that I had mail. It was a letter from the draft board ordering me to report for pre-induction physical. The hospital was in the middle of a field then.

Goose by the way says that I should nap through it all.

Swiss Army Knife Life

I once posted a picture of this Swiss Army knife and someone made some disparaging remarks about Swiss Army knives in general. I responded back that if you have never needed a Swiss Army knife, your life was likely confined to more civilized areas than I have frequented. Even a cursory examination will reveal that this knife has been well used. I am pretty sure it went to Newfoundland with me on our little trip to the barrens. I know it went in my pocket every day that I farmed. It did things it was never designed to do and some parts are broken as a result. It never failed me. I like to think the theme of my life is lot like that beaten up Swiss Army knife.

Somehow, I seemed to be prepared for whatever challenges that I faced. Perhaps it started when I grew up the child of single mother in the fifties. I tried not ever let having only one parent drag me down. Mother always told me that if I worked hard, I could be anything that I wanted to be. She pulled herself out of red clay soils of Yadkin County, NC and got her license to be a beautician. She supported us from the beauty shop attached to the back of the house.

In a sense being an only child of a mother who worked extremely long hours gave me a push into learning how to do things I might have avoided in a more standard family. I learned the basics of cooking because if we got food on the table at any reasonable hour, I needed to be involved. It started with just sticking food in the oven, but well before I got to Boy Scouts, I was grilling half chickens on an old charcoal grill. Tinkering with things started at an early age. By the third grade it was my job to balance the check book and make sure the deposits were recorded properly. At some point I became the navigator and developed a love of maps that still bedevils me today.

Being a Boy Scout accelerated many of these interests and enhanced my love of the out of doors. By the time I left college, I was in need of an escape from the cities. Regular visits to Maine had only made my desire to get back to the land worse. The old Nova Scotia farmhouse that I bought in 1971 only pushed me harder. I had to learn plumbing and how to wire a house at the same time my carpentry skills had to get better if we were going to have a place to survive the winter.

By the time we got to our New Brunswick farm, I was ready for almost anything. With a welder and an acetylene torch, there wasn’t much on the farm that could slow me down. I always had a John Deere tractor and a Chevy 350 3/4 ton 4WD that I could lean on and some great neighbors who were always willing to help. With some local help I even built a couple of barns that are still standing 50 years later.

After the farm, I went on to sell Apple computers, learned how to manage a sales force, and how to survive a teetering small business. When I actually went to work for Apple, the second day I was on board, they gave me a tray of real 35 mm slides and said you’re presenting to 100 people tomorrow, put together a presentation. If was the first of many presentations that would define my almost 20 year career at Apple. My last days at Apple in 2004, I was director of federal sales and sat with Avie Tevanian at a federal hearing on cyber security. Had Apple stuck more with open source and the direction our team was headed, there would be a lot more Macs in the federal government and our government would have a more resilient infrastructure.

After a consulting gig with the National Lambda Rail (some called it Internet 3), I went to work at an email company and learned the ins and outs of online marketing. It was a steep learning curve with Google analytics, buying search terms, and managing an inside sales force when I had spent most of my life in outside sales.

By the time the email company was sold, we were well on our way to establishing a life on the North Carolina coast, I worked a writer and I dabbled enough in real estate to know how to mine data from tax databases which turned out to be very useful when I became a vp at a company that was building fiber and convincing people to sign up for it. My love of maps led me to extensive use of Garmin’s mapping tools both on land and in my skiff and kayak. A knowledge of GPS helped me jump feet first into ArcGIS Pro and the technical reports and maps that have defined my last dozen years.

Not long ago, my barber asked me, “How in the world did you get from shoveling manure to selling computers and then helping to build fiber networks?

I told him the answer was simple, I always believed in what I was doing and I never sold anyone something that I wouldn’t be proud of using whether it was a bull, a bailer, a computer, or a report on the state of the Internet in their county. I could have said that I had a Swiss Army kind of life, always ready for the next challenge even as I was taking a lot hits along the way.

Growing Not Controlling People

Love can make a difference

My Mother in backyard of our Mt. Airy House.

My mother who grew up as Susie Blanche Styers was part of family that had lived in and around the hills north and west of Winston-Salem since the Revolutionary War. Our first ancestor in the area is recorded on the 1790 census and is buried with his wife forty-five minutes away from our current home.
Mother’s grandfather Abe Styers ran Styers ferry which crossed the Yadkin River from Yadkin County to Forsyth County. Forsyth County, the home of Winston-Salem, was destined to be a county that pulled itself into the manufacturing boom of the second half of the twentieth century. Yadkin County would remain solidly agricultural.
Mother was born on a mill pond in the heart of Yadkin County in 1910. It was a time before electricity and when horse drawn buggies were more likely to be found on the dirt roads than those new Model T Fords. Her mother, Sallie Shore Styers, died in the 1919 flu epidemic. By the time my mother was nine years old she was cooking for the family of eight.
That presented some challenges since she was too small to lift the heavy cast iron pan used to bake biscuits each morning from the flour mixed up weekly by one her older female relatives. Fortunately, her older brother Henry would help her with the pan after he had taken care of bringing the wood inside and starting a fire in the stove.
While life around a millpond in the early part of the twentieth century might sound idyllic, it was actually a lot of hard work, and a life that didn’t leave a lot of time for play. While Walter, mother’s father, was a miller, most of the rest of the food for the large family with six children had to be grown and preserved on the spot.
There was no yard to mow, just some bare ground to sweep around the house with homemade brooms made from the readily available broom straw. Preserving food for winter was a skill mother and her sisters never lost.
The stories of watching men cut blocks of ice from the pond during the winter and haul the loads of ice with teams of horses to their sawdust insulated ice house in the ground seem hard to believe in our warming world. Yet life was very different then. They kept their milk and butter cooled in a spring house which was little more that a small building with a roof set on top of a spring flowing out of the ground.
Mother had places to go and things to do in her life so it didn’t take much time with her new stepmother before she left home as a teenager for the big city of Mount Airy, NC. Eventually she got a license as a beautician and had her own shop on Main Street. She even claimed to have spanked Andy Griffith when he was misbehaving in her shop while she did his mother’s hair.
When she was in her nineties, she used to joke that she had walked by Snappy Lunch for most of her long life and never tasted one of their pork chop sandwiches. We bought her one, and she declared that she had not missed much.
While mother made it out of Yadkin County, her sisters never did. With the determination that only a true southern matriarch demonstrates, she was determined that her nieces and nephews would have a taste of life beyond the red dirt fields of Yadkin County. She was the only one of the sisters to learn how to drive as a teenager.
I’ve been told many times by cousins that they never would have enjoyed much of a Christmas without my mother. She was famous for braving the muddy roads to get back to her sister Mollie’s house. I remember her stories of getting stuck and having to knock on the door of a farmer’s house to be pulled out.

Goose and I just sent out a new newsletter, Goose Speaks: Memories of Love, Black Friday 2024. It has more about my mother. You don’t have to subscribe to read it, and there is a free subscription that will get most of the posts.

Goose Speaks Launches

Goose, the biggest of our tabby cats from the marshes

Goose has enjoyed some popularity on social media sites, including Facebook but also on Bluesky where one of his pictures got over 5,000 likes. Goose’s no nonsense attitude kept him from being quiet during the summer. His most famous quote has driven some of his popularity.

I have little tolerance for fools.

Goose follows a rigorous schedule that includes breakfast, bird watching, patrolling for squirrels, naps, dinner, and more naps. Then he gets his before bed treats. Goose isn’t so full of himself that having some fun dialogues is out of the question. He can get very passionate to the point of being hilarious when discussing the amount cat food in his bowl.

The following is an excerpt from Goose’s Newsletter this Sunday, November 24, 2024. Goose is talking about his first memories as a kitten.

Goose, “I remember how dark, cold and wet it was under the shed where we were born. What I remember best was how I would play with my sisters, Merlin, Jester, and Maverick in the sunlight at the back of the shed. Our mother, Elsie, told us to be careful and not to get far from the safety of the shed. She told us that there were all sorts of things that would eat us from hawks to alligators. Still when the sun was bright, we had lots of fun. We never saw any alligators but the marsh grass was so tall that even I couldn’t see over it.

We were sort of in a routine, nursing mom, playing, and then piling up together for naps. We were growing and it seemed that we were always hungry. After we were a few weeks old, mom carried us one by one up up over the bulkhead to the back of another building. It was a garage. There were bowls near it and they were full of what we were to learn is cat food. It was tough crunching for a while, but we learned it was a good way to not feel hungry. Sometimes we would hide until the people filled the bowls.

Then came the night mother left us in the garage. What happened next changed our lives.

The rest of the story is behind a paywall.

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There is a free subscription that will get you the occasional post, the paid subscriptions will get you everything. A $5 monthly subscription is only 16 cents a day. An annual $50 subscription is just 14 cents a day. If you subscribe you will be supporting not only an independent journalist but also helping to feed four growing tabby cats that have lots of love to spread around. Goose often share’s David’s recipes and cooking tips. Today provided directions for cooking perfect bacon. It you do a paid subscription, you will get some regular emails from Goose. He has his own website and his own email address.

Memories to hold close

I wrote this back in the fall of 2016. It was one of the nicest falls that we enjoyed in our fifteen years on the North Carolina coast. I wrote more than one post arguing that fall was even nicer on the coast than in the mountains.

Here is a brief description of the memorable month of November 2016, as seen from the water and the beaches of Carteret County.

The good fishing and nearly perfect weather, continues but I can already feel the best of fall sliding away.

On Saturday, November 5, I only had a few minutes late in the day to fish some close-in oyster bars on the White Oak River but it was spectacularly beautiful as you can see from the marsh grass picture. I also managed to catch and release another sixteen inch drum and bring home a sixteen inch trout for dinner.

On Tuesday, November 8, I had almost two hours to fish the oyster rocks in my kayak and I caught four red drum and one black drum. I brought home one nineteen inch drum. In the last ten days, I have landed ten red drum, the best around twenty inches and another at nineteen inches. I have only kept one red drum but I have kept two trout, one sixteen inches and another eighteen inches and also one black drum at fifteen inches. We have feasted on fish these last few days. Baked browned-butter, panko-encrusted drum is one of my favorites.

Last year, 2015, we did not have a fishing season like this one. I blamed it all on the early October rain we got. It is hard to miss a fishing season when fall fishing on the coast is such a tradition. This year we have been lucky. Since Mathew dropped three inches of rain on us October 8, we have only had two-tenths of an inch on October 22, and another two-tenths of an inch on November 4.

Fishing during fall of 2016 will stick in my memory.

Life Sneaks Up On You

The Royal Road, Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

Just after I graduated college in the summer of 1971, instead of going to Law School, I headed off to Nova Scotia. I was part of the generation that felt strongly about getting back to the land and understanding a lot of things that modern society was hiding from us.

A decision like that is possible when you are young, I believe that as age and life will sneak up on you, it gets much harder to go off on your own in a wild adventure as you age. How older people have done it, remains a mystery to me.

Eventually, I got married and my wife and I moved to what I considered a real farm or at least one that I believed that I could make into a modern farm. We never really gave up all modern conveniences like many back-to-the-landers. One of the first things that I installed in our Nova Scotia farmhouse was a dishwasher. I also put one in our home in New Brunswick. I plowed my garden with a John Deere tractor not a horse.

The road in the picture ran 20 miles back to Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick. We were lucky to have schools, churches, a couple of general stores and medical services in our little community of Tay Creek. Forty years after we left, the churches and general stores are gone. If you want to buy gasoline or a nail, you have to go to Fredericton.

Taking on building a home for your family in an isolated spot which at the time was subject to amazing snow storms is something you only do when you are young and your body can take on almost any challenge. In my twenties and thirties, I never doubted that I could do everything for my family aside from medical care and schooling. Plumbing, electrical wiring, installing appliances, those were expected of the folks who lived beyond the city. There was no one to hire to mow a yard or even change faucet. While we had an oil furnace, most of our heat came from a wood stove. The furnace would come on during the early morning hours as the house cooled. Our water came from a spring. Our food came from our garden, our milk cow, chickens and cattle herd.

As nice as the life on your own in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick was, it was non-stop work. It was ten years before we went on a real vacation. After we left the farm, we mostly lived in suburbs. Seven years after leaving the farm we were in subdivision on the side of a mountain in SW Virginia. For many years I kept the steep slope behind the house clear of brush and small trees. It meant working with a chainsaw on a hill where I could barely stand. Fortunately, I never got injured. It was another activity reserved for youth.

By the time we got to our next house twenty-four years after leaving the farm, the strenuous work was down to mowing the yard, keeping our skiff running, and hurricane preparation. Good preparation for a hurricane often meant the cleanup afterwards was relatively easy. A storm like Hurricane Florence meant extra cleanup for everyone in the area no matter how much you prepared. The older you get, the harder all that is. Polywood outdoor furniture is nice until you have to haul it all into the garage.

When we moved from the coast in 2021, my wife and I were both over seventy. We were far from our children and family. Our house had too many steps and we were both tired of the hurricane routine in spite of never having any real damage to our house.

My wife had almost five acres of raw farmland which was a hayfield in Surry County. We briefly considered building a home there, but quickly decided that we were too old for all the work needed to build a home so we found a great subdivision with public sewer, water, and fiber Internet. Moving to North Carolina Piedmont close to where I grew up has turned out to be a wise decision.

We are glad that we moved when we did. We have friends our age that would like to move from the coast but have decided that they are too old to try. I can relate to their feelings. Getting our coastal home ready to sell and moving with our four kittens was not the easiest thing that I have ever done. I am pretty sure that three years later, I would be reluctant to move again unless I just had to move.

You don’t think about these things when you are young and can handle anything. Life can sneak up on you. It is good to plan a little for the time when you can no longer take on the world with one arm tied behind your back.

Old Age Is Not For Sissies

Long ago I remember hearing my mother say, “Old age is not for sissies.” She was 84 and I was 45. When you are forty-five, you think you handle just about anything. In the twenty-four years after college, I moved to Canada where we farmed for ten years, and we moved back to the US. By the time we got to Roanoke, Virginia had already been selling Apples for nearly a decade. While I was a very successful sales person at Apple, my mother who knew nothing about computers knew a lot more about life than me.

She understood that families can get complicated, hard work does not always result in success, and most importantly she knew the value of continuing to work even when it was not easy. She could accomplish amazing things, but she did it not through a flurry of activity but through methodically getting things done as she was able. When she was in her nineties, she was proud of still being able to dress herself even though it took her over an hour. Her mother died during the 1918-19 flu pandemic. At the age of nine she became the lady of the house. She had to cook for her five siblings. Many times she told me the story of making biscuits in the morning for the family but having one of the boys put the heavy cast iron pan in the wood stove because she could not lift it. She left home in her teens because the new stepmother and my mother did not see eye to eye.

If I remember the story correctly, as mother was leaving leaving home, she told the stepmother that if it ever got to her that the stepmother had laid a finger on one of her sisters, she and her favorite cast iron frying pan would be back to deal with it. Mother had grown into being very proficient with a cast iron pan. Blanche, after putting herself through cosmetology school, became a successful beautician running her own shop on Main Street in Mount Airy and later after I was born, she had one in the back of our house in Lewisville, North Carolina. It was the way she supported us. As a single mom in the fifties, she managed to raise me and become a very popular Boy Scout mom who was considered a better driver than most of the men.

I never lacked for love. I also learned the value of education and hard work. Like all of us, mother had things in her life that challenged her, but she always rose to the challenge even if it involved a lot of false starts. She was someone you could count on when help was needed. We had a cattle field day at our farm in the late seventies. My mother who was in her late sixties got on an airplane and flew from North Carolina to New Brunswick which included switching terminals by herself in Boston to help feed the 300 people who showed up. Mother was in her mid-eighties before she gave up her driver’s license. When she did it, she told me not to worry, if there was an emergency, she could still drive. A few years after giving up driving, she had to give up working in her flowers. It was the stairs in and out of her house that put an end to the flowers. It was then that we realized the house was holding her prisoner.

When our good friend RJ who was living upstairs in the house died suddenly, mother had to move. RJ had been her legs, getting groceries and things that they needed. She had continued to cook for them as he continued to work for the local newspaper. Mother moved in with us and we offered her our main floor bedroom. She wouldn’t hear of it. Every night, she would go up the stairs on her rear, one step at a time to one of our other bedrooms. It is appropriate to mention at this time that one of our daughters likes to say she comes from a long line of stubborn. It is pretty easy to see the source. Eventually we built mother her own room and bathroom but it was only a matter of time, before mother reluctantly had to move into an assisted living facility. In spite of declaring she could never make new friends, she made some of the best friends of her life in those last three years. It was only in the last few days of her life that she had to have help getting dressed. Only after all her new friends passed away was she was ready to let go. Her mind was still clear but her body had worn out long ago. She was ninety-three years and six months old. She is still missed every day by those of us she touched and nurtured. I have cousins who say that they would have never had Christmas if it wasn’t for their Aunt Blanche, my mother. Another who is now ninety himself claims that he would have gone down a bad road and likely be dead if my mother hadn’t forced him to go to military school. She was a force of nature.

While I still miss her, I am proud of the values that she instilled in me, and the help that she provided our family when our children were growing up. I hope she is pleases at the kind of family we have become.

Someone Lives Here

My First Home on the Bay of Fundy after a year’s work

I was gone most of the summer of 1970, it seemed like the most logical thing to do after all the college protests. A roommate and I drove to Alaska and we returned barely ahead of the snow and just before school started. When we came back I was determined to find some land away from the big cities of the East. In the spring of 1971, I wrote to the Longmire Real Estate agency of Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, about a farm and land on the shores of the Bay of Fundy. The property was advertised in the Sunday Boston Globe. At the time there was only a print version of the paper and reading the Sunday paper was something many of us really enjoyed. The trip to look at the place sealed the deal.

Though the details took time to work out, I ended up the owner of 140 acres, a two hundred year old house, barn, and carriage house in Saint Croix Cove. That first piece of land and buildings cost around $7,000. The view of the Bay of Fundy was spectacular. The picture at the top is the house after a year’s work. This what it looked like when I bought it.

When I bought the house, it was in a sheep pasture and had not been lived in for years. The old chimney went quickly. We also tore out the insides down to walls and hand-hewn, pegged six by sixes that framed the house. It was a huge undertaking Still after a year it looked a lot better, was insulated, had heat, hot water, a new kitchen and a shower

Even with all that work I am not sure it looked like someone was living there all the time. My mother and her sister came up and worked on the house during the summer of 1972 and stayed with us for a couple of weeks but most of their time was spent on canning and freezing produce from the garden.

My Mother and Her Sister Visiting in 1972

The next summer, I made a trip to Boston to help an old college roommate get married. Then I headed south and stopped in Washington, DC to spend a short time with another college friend that I enjoyed. From there I went home to Mount Airy, North Carolina. My mother was always scheming to keep me at home a little longer. She arranged a blind date with Glenda, a young lady from UNC Greensboro.

It was one of those love at first sight dates. I cooked Lobsters for our first dinner together. The next day we picnicked on the Blue Ridge Parkway. When she headed back to her apartment in Greensboro, the plan was that she was going to drop me off at the airport on the way but few other than my mother would be surprised that we never stopped there. We spent a magical few days in her apartment. About sixty days later after Glenda made a trip to Nova Scotia to check things out, we got married. She wasn’t in Nova Scotia long before she started making our home look like someone was living there.

My wife, Glenda’s first flower bed in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia

It didn’t take long for flowers to be added. During my mother’s next trip, Glenda and my mother decided we needed a lawn mower which they got on a trip to town by themselves. In short order the yard look like a normal yard.

Our St. Croix Cove home after Glenda had tamed it and won the hearts of Tok and Fundy

We moved from the green house on the shore road in the fall of 1974. We needed better farmland if we were going to be successful. It was less than a year before our next house looked like someone was living there.

Our Tay Creek Farm House the first summer there 1975

The picture above was taken in 1975, almost fifty years ago. If you stretch your imagination, you might come close to imagining how many flowers have been planted in the name of making our houses look like someone lives in them over those forty-nine years. Last summer’s (2023) flowers are pictured below.

Summer of 2023’s front flower bed at our home in Mocksville, NC

My mother was probably 84 years old when she had to give up planting flowers and tomatoes. For the next six years until mother moved in with us, Glenda would go down in the fall and plant a huge bed of pansies that my mother could watch grow from fall through spring. It was something that made mother smile. When we are in our eighties, I hope we have someone willing to add a little beauty to our lives when we can no longer plant it ourselves.

**My Glenda amending the soil in Nova Scotia with some well-rotted chicken manure**

My mother watering her azaleas in the seventies when she started renewing the gardens

Mother’s azaleas just before she moved in 2004

Our Quirky Family Food

Years ago people ate what the cook, usually the mother of the family, put in front of them. When I was at boarding school, you ate what was on the table or went for the jar of peanut butter. It is interesting look back at not only what we ate but how our tastes have changed. Driving around the country in my teens taught me you could have ketchup with you eggs. Going to military school in Tennessee introduced me to grits and unfortunately powdered scrambled eggs.

A lot of today’s foods weren’t around when I was growing up. I still remember my first fast food restaurant, a Burger King, near Winston-Salem in the late fifties. Mostly we ate at home which in the South meant fried chicken on Sunday and lots of vegetables during the week.

My mother canned a lot, and she also froze some vegetables. We had relatives with bigger gardens and freezers than ours so we were never out of vegetables We ate a lot of Pinto beans and cornbread. I learned to love cabbage. Excitement when I was young was a Chef Boyardee Pizza kit. I didn’t have a real pizza until freshmen year in college.

After college on our farm in Canada, my wife and I were lucky to grow most of our food. I was the seventies and early eighties. There were hippies afoot but we were serious famers with tractors and lots of cattle. When we lived in Nova Scotia, we picked broccoli in five gallon buckets and rushed fresh picked corn to already boiling water in the kitchen. We gambled on tomatoes but ones ground on the shore of Nova Scotia were nothing like North Carolina tomatoes. New Brunswick had more heat which better tomatoes, more reliable corn and less broccoli.

Eating out when you were running a farm far from town and have three kids was maybe a trip to the one McDonald’s on a run to town or a stop by the Chinese restaurant that was usually deserted enough for the kids to run around and play. With a farm there was always beef in the freezer and my wife put up something north of one fifty jars of vegetables each year and froze plenty to go with that and fill our two big chest freezers. We hauled out of the cellar each year four times the number of potatoes that we ate.

My early years in North Carolina were different than when our kids were growing up. I never remember asking for something different than what was on the table. When our children grew up in Virginia, there were so many grilled cheese sandwiches and dippy eggs that I sometimes felt like a short order cook.

Our tastes started evolved as we started grilling salmon but we never gave up on canned salmon cakes which were always a staple when growing up. I never gave up on Codfish cakes, but my wife never took them and always maintained they were just an excuse to drink a lot of beer. When we could get good seafood, the years in Nova Scotia and our sixteen years on the North Carolina coast, fresh seafood was included as much as the budget allowed or my angling skill would put on the table.

I have always done some of the cooking. My wife claims that she has never cooked my breakfast in over fifty years of marriage. Even the very few times we had pancakes, I always cooked the breakfast meat. Now I am semi-retired, working only three or four days a week, and my wife is unable to do the shopping. I try watch my carbs and my wife has to watch what she eats because of her kidneys. We also have an adult mid-forties son living with us. He will not eat chicken, turkey, or fish. He eats limited amounts of pork, beef, and hotdogs. My wife and I love beans and soups. We have expanded beyond Pintos, eating Anasazi beans and whatever we see that catches our eye on Rancho Gordo’s site. We have older relatives who supply us with a localized version of Crowder peas which we call Joe’s peas since his family has been growing them and saving the seeds for over one hundred years.

We are also fans of cabbage, broccoli, and whatever else that can be sourced locally. My wife and I love local berries and all sorts of apples. Our son will only eat honey crisp apples preferably from Whole Foods. We grow our own tomatoes during the summer and readily admit to loving either plain tomato sandwiches or BLTs.

I am a huge fan of country sausage, country ham, and true country bacon, but the breakfast meat that I eat the most is turkey sausage which no one else in the family will touch. I also love country fresh eggs and rarely buy any from the grocery store.

I started baking sourdough bread in the seventies and my wife took over the bread baking in the eighties until we moved back to the states. I took up sourdough baking seriously again fourteen years ago. Recently to save time and mess, I have been using the Wildgrain par-baked frozen bread service. When I want a loaf of bread, I put a frozen sourdough loaf from the freezer into the toaster oven. It bakes for 21 minutes in the oven and finishes baking another twenty minutes outside the oven. It is very good and very little different in price from the bakery bread I sought out when I didn’t have time to bake.

I enjoy grilling, my favorite food to grill is half-chickens. We have consciously given up on the big steaks that I used to carve up into fillet mignon and a strip steak with a bone. I would buy a couple on special, my wife and son would eat the fillets. I would eat the strips, first hot and then cold sliced in wraps or on a salad. I am also a big fan of smoking food and chicken thighs would be my smoked food of choice.

This is North Carolina so a good third of meals out revolve around barbecue. We try to limit out eating out to one or two meals a week. My wife and I often split a Jersey Mike’s sub while our son can do in a whole one. We sometimes do fried flounder at one the local restaurants and maybe once every three months, I might get some Chinese food and try to go light on the rice.

My wife loves ice cream which I try to avoid but I did have a Dairy Queen cone with her the other day. It was the first Dairy Queen we had seen in the three years that we have been here. That Dairy Queen in Salisbury, NC has been operating in the same spot for 75 years.

Given all that, meal planning and the shopping to make those meals is challenging. My son is always up for a taco and since I have found some good low-carb wraps, I can live with that. My wife makes a great turkey meatloaf based on the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe, I can eat that hot or cold, breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Given all this history perhaps the hotdogs and steak at the top of the post make a little sense. My wife and son had hot dogs and I ate a grass-fed sirloin steak. Neither of them like sirloins. I have one eight ounce steak a month from the Pre company. It usually costs $7.99 on sale which I consider reasonable for the quality. It took me a little experimenting to get it right but I can now cook it perfectly to my taste. In the continuing effort to improve the quality of what we eat, I added red Quinoa to my spinach salad. Usually by this time of year I have switched to the spinach from our garden but something has eaten most of it and the weather hasn’t been kind to the rest of it.

However, Sunday April 28, we had a big lettuce harvest with a small bag of spinach. With an upcoming week of heat, we figured it was time to take what we could and hope for a better season next year. It turned out to be a pretty nice harvest.

This afternoon it was time for another food compromise. My wife was worn out from processing all the lettuce we picked. I had hoped to grill some chicken thighs but I ran out of time. I agreed to a simple dinner. We stuck a frozen baked ziti into the oven. My wife made fresh Caesar salad. A baked a loaf of sourdough from Wildgrain and made some crouton from hotdogs buns. Normally I would veto a pasta and fresh bread at night but I considering the circumstances I went for it. Tomorrow, I will really have to watch my carbs but not until after breakfast.

Being Part of the World

Back in the not so good world of the fifties when we feared polio and practiced hiding under desks to keep us safe from nuclear war, connecting with the world wasn’t optional. There is a good chance you walked to school. It was likely played dodge ball or kick ball on the playground in the morning. After getting home, many of us headed to the woods to maintain our forts and dams. Then there was mowing yards and even some garden work at times. Digging worms certainly connected me to Mother Earth and to the wrath of my mother if I got too close to some of her flowers.

Weekends were often devoted to Boy Scouts and camping on a nearby by farm. Our water came from an old hand pump. We pitched tents and cooked over open fires. We usually had an adult with us but in the early days when there only half a dozen of us, we often camped without one. No one feared the dark or worried about crazies with guns. When we weren’t in the woods with other Scouts, we were sometimes chasing squirrels with rifles and shotguns.

Fishing was a much more successful endeavor. It was not unusual for my mother to drop my best friend, Mike, and me at my some fishing ponds in the next county. She wasn’t an irresponsible mother, we were responsible kids who knew out to swim and take care of ourselves. I cannot even count the number of days we spent fishing without seeing another person before we were old enough to drive. We did catch fish and we ate them.

We still lived in a world where there were more country stores than supermarkets. People had big gardens. When the weather got cold in the fall, some relative would always bring some fresh country sausage. In the summer mother would can tomatoes and beans and freeze corn.

As we got older I went away to military school and then to college. I did not come back to stay for sixty years, but the connections to the natural world had already been made.

By the time I got to college, I was desperate to get back to the woods. Even spending the summers camping and traveling to Alaska wasn’t enough.

So Maine it was during college and then Nova Scotia and eventually Newfoundland. There were float plane trips into the bush, rides on an ice breaker that got stuck in the ice, and wandering the woods where it was nearly impossible to know where you were without a map and compass.

While my love of the outdoors almost got derailed by the toxic work environment at Apple, I eventually escaped to North Carolina’s Crystal Coast which my oldest son claimed was barely clinging to civilization because we had no Chipotle.

There might have been a shortage of chain fast-food, but it was a place where a kayak or a skiff could take you to natural worlds that stretched your imagination. Over time those placed healed my soul and helped me to reconnect with the world beyond our houses.

By 2017, I was walking 10,000 steps a day for a whole year which is equivalent to 69 marathons a year. I had piloted our skiff over 500 hours, paddled and biked endless miles. We managed to compost all our household waste and grow far more vegetables than we could eat.

All that helped me recover from Apple and get the strength to complete the circle and move back home. It has been a successful trip home. We’re back to gardening and I still hike some.

However, I worry about the generations after us that never forged the link with the outside world. They never camped and fished their way through childhood and even if they did, the screens and phones seduced them. We were immune. There is no meaning to be gained from screens. There might be important words on the screen but if the words just lead you to another screen you have gained nothing but more screen time.

Yet if your hands have ever worked in dirt, even it they have been clean for a long time, the dirt will welcome them back and it won’t be long before the long suppressed memories guide the hands back to growing things. Those growing plants will remind you that you are just one of many living things that are all interconnected. If you can get to that point, you are on the right track to a worthwhile relationship with yourself and the world.